GeekDad Interview: Starhawk Developer Dylan Jobe

After a long wait, Starhawk releases this week. The game, a third person shooter and spiritual successor to the game Warhawk, features a rich single player campaign and a deep multiplayer experience. To find out more about the game, we talked to Dylan Jobe, president ofLightbox Interactive, who developed Starhawk for the Playstation 3. Read on to find out more about the games inspiration, why its the best shooter for younger players, and what Starhawk feature is the best addition to any shooter game in years.

Banks:Starhawk has an old-west-in-outer-space feel, reminiscent of Firefly and other great shows, movies, and books. What were your inspirations for the story in Starhawk?

Jobe: We had a lot of inspiration from classic westerns and classic sci-fi. We were privileged to work with a guy who worked on Star Wars characters with George Lucas, a conceptartistnamed Ian McCaig. He designed Darth Maul and a number of other characters. We brought him in and he helped us on the world and universe in the early stages.

When we got into more nitty gritty development of the actual screenwriting with dialogue and the actual story, we brought in a writer from Austin, who had a lot of experience with westerns, a guy named Koen Wooten. His family helped as wranglers for Last of the Mohicans. He did prop work for True Grit and Appaloosa. He was very familiar with the genre, but we were fortunate to work with him because he loves games very dearly.

We often referred to classic westerns when we wanted to tell a story about a man and his family, even though it takes place in the vastness of the frontier. In many respects, the classic western tale pertains to a white half, black half kind of structure, isolated small town in the vast expanding west in the United States. So there were a lot of classic American western influences in the conflict between Emmett and his brother Logan to the industrial expansion of mines and towns throughout the frontier. There were many, many parallels to American history.

Banks:The betas been out for a while now and one of the great things about games, video games especially, is seeing all of the organic things that happen. Was there anything that you saw in the beta or didnt anticipate people doing with the game?

Jobe: On the good side, we were pleasantly surprised to see people build and battle pretty quickly, so that was a good thing. One of the things that was tricky was that not all players were doing good building. A lot of players were excited to build, but they were kind of being dumb when they were building.When youre playing the team mode online, if you go off and build stuff for your personal enjoyment, but not building with a tactical mind or a smart mind for your team, then youre not doing well for the rifters or outcasts, depending on which team youre on.

So, we decided to help combat this by changing the single player campaign. We added the concept of specific beats throughout the story where Cutter, your gear man, might give you a hint as to things you might want to build. We put a faint wire frame in the world, to give you an idea as to where structures should be built. Things like If I want to build a choke-point, this is a good place to do it or I can build my auto-turrets on the ground, but I can see the wireframes up on the top of the bunker, I could put them out of harms way. So we decided to seed the single player with hints to help players build more appropriately for their teams.

The other thing was we saw in the beta was that some players didnt build at all. They like to play purely as shooters. We would see these players get Starhawkand play online, reaping all the benefits of Build & Battle, even though they didnt build a single structure. But their teammates like to build, so they get the benefit of it, which was a pretty cool thing to see. Truth be told, the fusing of RTS and shooter elements isnt standard first person shooter recipe. So, we were concerned it would be off-putting to pure shooter fans. But to see pure shooter players enjoying the game and being successful, even though they werent actively building. Its good to see those kind of players still have a home in this kind of game.

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GeekDad Interview: Starhawk Developer Dylan Jobe